Conte content, but for how long?

THERE has been an inevitability to Chelsea’s title run for months. It felt to many that if it wasn’t going to be – as it was – a win at West Brom on Friday night, then it would be today when Spurs face Manchester United or tomorrow when Watford visit Stamford Bridge.

But familiarity ought not to diminish what we witnessed over the past nine months. Here was a manager who had never played or worked abroad, taking over a side that had finished 10th the year before and doing so in early July, after coaching his country at the European Championships. Not only that, he saw his club fail to land two of their top three transfer targets, settling instead for Marcos Alonso and David Luiz in the final hours of the summer window.

Antonio Conte coped with all this and, after a rollercoaster start, reinvented his team along 3-4-3 lines, following a thumping by Arsenal.

“We hit rock bottom in that game,” he said Friday night. “I realised I wasn’t able to transmit a single idea to the players on the pitch. We had to change. And when you change that much, you can’t do it on your own. You need to be lucky that you make the right changes. And lucky that you have the backing of the players, the fans and the club.”

There followed that run of 13 straight victories. The tactical shift – coupled with no European football, the return to form of Thibaut Courtois, Eden Hazard and Diego Costa, and the emergence of Alonso, David Luiz and Victor Moses into viable Premier League contributors, plus another sterling campaign from the immense N’Golo Kante – was at the heart of Chelsea’s title, the fifth of the Roman Abramovich era.

Conte immediately spun the narrative forward to the next goal, the FA Cup, saying: “We must turn a great season into a fantastic season.” But the question is where he and Chelsea go from here.

He has two seasons left on the three-year deal he signed last summer, but this being the Premier League gravy train, a pay rise and extension are inevitable. Few in England believe he would leave – and rightly so – but that doesn’t mean that stories don’t get spun elsewhere, whether of homesickness or of mega-offers from Chinese owners (in this case, the Antonio Conte celebrates a remarkable league triumph ones who own Inter, not those over in China, possibly because there’s a limit to people’s credulity).

Odds are, Conte’s future won’t be decided by the size of his pay cheque, but rather his influence over the club. And that sets up an interesting conundrum.

In Abramovich’s first few seasons, the money flowed and decisions were made by a royal court of agents, scouts, friends-of-friends, jesters and hangers-on. Since 2009, the club has been decidedly more prudent, trying to run themselves as a business, limiting the power of the manager over contracts and transfers and putting staff in place to provide continuity even as coaches changed. That is how they have managed to have seven managers in eight seasons and still won three league titles, two FA Cups, a League Cup, a Europa League and a Champions League.

Already, the number of handpicked assistants on his staff was a major sticking point: Conte ended up with seven, but he wanted two more. This summer, you would imagine, he would want assurances in terms of transfer budgets and more control over who comes in.

IPhotograph: Getty

Given that his stock is at an alltime high, you would expect Chelsea to cave in to some degree. But this negotiation could run and run. And eventually affect what happens in the summer.

The minute one battle is won, there is immediately another one to fight. T wasn’t pretty and, but for John Guidetti’s profligacy (and seeming inability, as a former Manchester City academy player, to write a storybook script for himself), it might never have come to pass. But the reality is that Manchester United are in the Europa League final. While the club and Jose Mourinho went out of their way to big up the competition (“A trophy we’ve never won!”) the more important fact of the matter is they are 90 minutes away from qualifying for the 2017-18 Champions League.

They will face an Ajax side who – despite their glorious history – haven’t reached a European final in 22 years, since the days of the man who was in charge at Old Trafford last season, in fact, Louis van Gaal. They also seem to embody many of the stereotypes associated with recent Dutch football: attacking in numbers, papier-mache defending and a soft underbelly.

While anybody who saw a wellrested United and their jitters on Thursday – at Old Trafford, against the 12th-best side in La Liga – won’t take anything for granted, there is no question it’s nicely set up for Mourinho. Champions League participation next season and two major trophies can be sold as a step forward, even if the league place – particularly if they falter today against a Spurs side who have little to play for other than proving to the world they are not bottlers – suggest otherwise.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino was always going to have a tall order ahead of him. Reforming Fifa is tough enough, improving the organisation’s image is about as simple as getting a battleship to U-turn in a shipping canal.

He has introduced sweeping reforms and reaffirmed on Thursday at the Fifa Congress that while the “crisis” was over, the process is still on-going. And, in fact, he welcomed more investigations from law enforcement, like the indictment from the US Department of Justice that hit Richard Lai, head of the Guam Football Association, who is accused of bribery. Or the revelation that one of the unnamed co-conspirators in the original indictment was none other than Kuwait’s Sheikh Ahmed Al-Sabah, a powerful “kingmaker” in Fifa and IOC circles.

Where he did not help himself was in labelling some of the media scrutiny he and Fifa were receiving – especially after the ousting of Cornel Borbely and Hans-Joachim Eckert, chairmen of the organisation’s Ethics committees – as “fake news”. Borbely and Eckert were depicted by some as independent figures who were willing to stand up to Infantino. That may have been true to some degree, but they were also appointed by the Sepp Blatter administration and they are the same people who ensured that the Garcia Report into corruption in the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups never saw the light of day.

Still, calling such reporting “fake news” involves the use of a very loaded term these days. And I’m not sure Infantino – or Fifa – necessarily want to be associated with the guy who popularised it, one Donald J Trump.